Joe Leydon says this is one of his favorite pictures of Arthur C. Clarke, who died today at the age of 90. I agree. Partly because I grew up with an Osborne 1 computer, and I saw several Kaypro machines at the F.O.G. meetings that I used to attend with my dad in the 1980s. And partly because it was during this period that I saw 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984; my comments) and, through it, discovered both... Read more

Good grief, I’m still trying to find time to polish off some thoughts about the first season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and now, only a few days after I posted all those photos of all the actors who have played Kyle Reese to date, the Hollywood Reporter tells us this — oh, and trust me, you probably do not want to read the original story, which seems to give away a major spoiler. Here is what I can pass... Read more

Denys Arcand is nothing if not obsessed with history. So when I heard that he conceived his newest film as part of a “trilogy” with The Decline of the American Empire (1986) and The Barbarian Invasions (2003), I just knew that the title of the new film — Days of Darkness — could not be correct. Surely, given that the original French title is L’Âge des ténèbres, a phrase like The Dark Ages would have been more accurate — and... Read more

I have talked before about how my daughter goes right up to the TV screen when a DVD comes to an end. Here she is going right up to the movie screen as the credits roll at the end of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, which I saw with her yesterday. It was Elizabeth’s second movie, following The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, and this time, she stayed awake for the whole thing. (Her brother hadn’t been feeling very... Read more

I have no idea if escape artist Harry Houdini really was the first movie star to do battle with a robot, but obviously someone had to be! The interesting thing is that the Houdini film in which this robot appeared, The Master Mystery (1920), came out a year or two before the premiere of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the Czech play that introduced the word “robot” in the first place. So in the film, this mechanical monstrosity with the electric... Read more

Here are the figures for the past weekend, arranged from those that owe the highest percentage of their take to the Canadian box office to those that owe the lowest. Never Back Down — CDN $1,000,000 — N.AM $8,603,195 — 11.6%The Other Boleyn Girl — CDN $2,210,000 — N.AM $19,153,729 — 11.5%Semi-Pro — CDN $3,240,000 — N.AM $29,766,552 — 10.9%The Bank Job — CDN $1,230,000 — N.AM $13,257,949 — 9.3%10,000 B.C. — CDN $5,690,000 — N.AM $61,577,423 — 9.2%College Road... Read more

Jim Hill thinks so: From what I’ve heard, studio suits seem to be cooling to the idea of producing movie versions of all seven of C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books. And unless “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” does truly huge box office once it’s released to theaters in May of this year … Disney & Walden Media (i.e. Mickey’s partner on the “Narnia” film series) will probably still go forward with production of the already-in-development “The Voyage of the Dawn... Read more

Variety has yet another story on The Golden Compass and the question of whether Warner Brothers will go ahead with the rest of the His Dark Materials franchise, which began under the now-defunct team at New Line. The gist of it is that the franchise needs the overseas market to stay afloat, but the distributors who bought the overseas rights to the first film might have dibs on the sequels, too — and Warner doesn’t want to distribute any movies,... Read more

Last month, I linked to a story about Alejandro Amenábar’s next movie, about religious turmoil in 4th-century Alexandria. Today, Variety reports that the movie starts shooting in Malta on Monday, and it finally has a definite title: Rachel Weisz and Max Minghella will star in ancient Egyptian epic “Agora,” the next film by Alejandro Amenabar and the first production from Fernando Bovaira’s new Madrid-based banner Mod Prods. . . . “Agora,” Amenabar’s second English-language film after Nicole Kidman starrer “The... Read more

One year ago, I mentioned that Brad Bird — the Oscar-winning director of The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007) — was thinking of making his live-action debut, and Pixar’s, with a movie about the San Francisco earthquake called 1906. Today, the Hollywood Reporter says the movie is a go — and it will be co-produced by Disney/Pixar and Warner Brothers: The story centers on a college student who begins to investigate the murder of his father,... Read more